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Comment by chobeat | Hacker News Reader

I suggest this reading to anybody interested in this topic: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3078224

It tracks the history of this narrative and explains who profits from it.

This phenomenon has a clear political and ideological root and both journalists, politicians and engineers should fight against it together.

If you want to explore more related topics there's plenty of related content in a reading list I've been developing in the last few months: https://github.com/chobeat/awesome-critical-tech-reading-lis...

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From the abstract:

> In practice, the confusion around AI’s capacities serves as a pretext for imposing more metrics upon human endeavors and advancing traditional neoliberal policies. The revived AI, like its predecessors, seeks intelligence with a “view from nowhere” (disregarding race, gender, and class) — which can also be used to mask institutional power in visions of AI-based governance.

Later:

> The manufactured AI revolution has created the false impression that current systems have surpassed human abilities to the point where many areas of life, from scientific inquiry to the court system, might be best run by machines. However, these claims are predicated on a narrow and radically empiricist view of human intelligence. It’s a view that lends itself to solving profitable data analysis tasks but leaves no place for the politics of race, gender, or class. Meanwhile, the confusion over AI’s capabilities serves to dilute critiques of institutional power. If AI runs society, then grievances with society’s institutions can get reframed as questions of “algorithmic accountability.” This move paves the way for AI experts and entrepreneurs to present themselves as the architects of society.

This is implausible, to say the least. Isn't this basically a conspiracy theory? Not to mention, huge tech companies were already huge before the AI hype. I'm 4 pages in and I still don't know what's the author's point, other than promoting conspiracy theories and spreading FUD about AI.

They are not conspirancy theories because they don't assume a concerted effort from these entities but just a common interest and their action converge to reinforce the same phenomenon.

The author is a system biologist writing about sociology, so the paper should be read with the vocabulary of sociology, not of colloquial language.

> They are not conspirancy theories

Agreed, I've read a bit more:

> The pragmatic interest on the part of industry is natural, since the behaviorist approach that has appealed to many AI researchers aligns with the profit motives of surveillance capitalism.

Still, the language is loaded, the examples of claims (of AI proponents) are cherry-picked, the limitations of technology are misrepresented and the results are dismissed because they don't take "historical context" or "emotions visible clearly on the faces" into account.

It doesn't read like a scientific paper at all - or is this how papers in non-STEM look like in general?

The language is loaded because it's part of an ongoing discourse that by

>is this how papers in non-STEM look like in general?

you're not familiar with. And yes, this is quite a good paper for sociology standards. It comes from a STEM-guy so I think I like his style of writing.

> the examples of claims (of AI proponents) are cherry-picked,

This is not hard science where you have to find hard rules and a counter-example breaks your argument. He's commenting on a trend that we can all relate to. Is it a vocal minority or it's actually the vast majority of the industry/media? For that you can go back to data but that's not the goal of the paper and it doesn't invalidate his thesis anyway, as long as the narrative dominates the public discourse.

> you're not familiar with.

Agreed - unfortunately, I'm not familiar with the field at all :(

> it doesn't invalidate his thesis anyway

But, but, his thesis is that we're inevitably heading in the direction of a dystopia with "robo judges" and scientific pursuit being judged based on "metrics"... And that "surveillance capitalism" companies and the proponents of AI are power-hungry demons who plan to use AI to force some unspecified "psychology model" on the society as a whole!

Well, maybe that's how it is - I suspect it's not like that, but I can't know for sure. My objection is that, whatever the plans of evil corporations and traitors-to-humanity scientists, our current technology is nowhere near enabling any of the "changes to society" the author fears. The "superhuman intelligence" is not going to surface for a long time, the "bots" which "write quality editorials and replace journalists" will probably be realized something like 5 years before the "superhuman intelligence" mentioned, so also in the (very) far future. As for funding science, it's not AI (nor AI proponents) who come up with "metrics", but people, and they did so for the past 2 centuries at the very least. Yes, it's dangerous, but it has nothing to do with AI. The paper makes it sound like the hype around the AI is an imminent danger to the society-as-we-know-it, but isn't it infinitely more probable that this hype will follow thousands of others and simply die out?

I guess what I want to say is that the difference in complexity between - also impressive in their own right - current ML-based solution and any kind of understanding is so vast that worrying about what will happen when the AI will be capable of the latter in no way justifies the sensationalist tone of the article.

Well, I could be misinterpreting the author due to my unfamiliarity, so maybe it's not particularly sensationalist for the field and I just misinterpreted it.

> But, but, his thesis is that we're inevitably heading in the direction of a dystopia with "robo judges" and scientific pursuit being judged based on "metrics"... And that "surveillance capitalism" companies and the proponents of AI are power-hungry demons who plan to use AI to force some unspecified "psychology model" on the society as a whole!

I would argue that this is the present, not the future.

> Well, maybe that's how it is - I suspect it's not like that, but I can't know for sure. My objection is that, whatever the plans of evil corporations and traitors-to-humanity scientists, our current technology is nowhere near enabling any of the "changes to society" the author fears.

You don't need advanced technology for that. The existing technology is more than enough and we're seeing the devastating effects on the existing society. I don't think that for the thesis of the author, the actual progress of technology is relevant: if it looks intelligent, they will apply the narrative and profit from it.

The author is talking about how the promise of a yet to come AGI helps to build a narrative today that is used to exploit people. This is one thing. The dystopia is a critique to the narrative itself, that would lead to even further deterioration of the social fabric if it keeps being pursued. This is completely independent by the satisfaction of the promise of AGI or similar. As long as the narrative is believable, it will be used.

I feel the list misses a lot of the literature in "software studies" eg.

http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=74

https://monoskop.org/images/a/a1/Fuller_Matthew_ed_Software_...

Can you please create a PR? I will gladly go through the content

I'm actually not strong on those topics. It's on my neverending list, but...

Continental philosophy and "theory" are time-consuming in that one needs to grep for the truffles in the mud. I've spent >10 years reading Gilles Deleuze in my free time and now I see him as the harbinger of surprisingly useful ideas (many of which the "technical community" has discovered independently, from computer viruses to the tension between decentralization and centralization, but still really novel for 1970-1980 when his core works were published) -- but it was difficult getting there! I got into Deleuze because I fell in love with the prose, but you will be forgiven if you group him with Derrida and Foucault and even French Marxists because he's (1) a creature of his time and friends with many of those now-irrelevant figures and (2) fluid and ambivalent almost if required to be consistent with his own teachings.

So... I wish I had time for "software studies", but I'm currently working on a method for betting on horses^H^H^Hmarathon runners using the gamma process and the idea of risk-free measures from finance.

interesting list on github - thanks for sharing that here.

I'm looking at the "Coding is not fun" article right now ..will also check out the "Manufacturing an Artificial Intelligence Revolution" that you linked above.

you're welcome ^^

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